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Here and There…Now and Then |
Sunset From My Office
Now that the sun is going down before I leave work, it’s sort of tough to get good sunset pictures. My office looks northwest, so today, as the sun was going down, I did get a view, if I looked to the left out the window, of a little color on the clouds. It’s not much of a sunset, I admit, but I’ll take what I can get.
We had a few quite dreary days of rain and it finally cleared up today, so that was nice.
Night
This picture isn’t everything I thought it might be, but it still evokes a memory. The crescent moon was shining through the quickly moving clouds this evening at about 9:00 p.m. and I found a place to park, so I could enjoy it for a few minutes. I put the camera on the roof of the car and took a few pictures. This one was with the 70–300mm lens at 240mm, f/5.7 for 1 second. It’s not very sharp, but still kind of nice. I got one more after this before the clouds got thicker and the moon was gone.
Yet Another Sunset
We have sunsets every day, as I think I’ve mused before. But really spectacular sunsets are much more rare. We often get pretty sunsets, though, and this evening was a good example. I was driving directly away from the sun and could see it in my rear view mirror. I found a place to stop for a picture. Actually, it was the same median where I took the picture titled Zelkovas On Fire (Friday, October 30, 2015). Most of the sky was not particularly colored but with a 300mm lens, I was able to look only at the area around the sun, which was quite brilliantly orange.
Lake Needwood
I headed down by Lake Needwood on the way home this evening. The sunlight was so sharp and the air was so clear. The evening light, with the southwestern hills casting shadows on the other side of the lake, was incredibly beautiful. The wind was quite low so there was only a little bit of movement in the water and the colors were reflecting wonderfully. As you can see, most of the leaves are down, but there are oaks still holding on to the deep reds, enhanced by the color of the light.
Evening Clouds
I left work early today to drive up to BWI to pick up my mom and others who were returning from a trip to a few eastern European countries. They spent about three weeks in Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia. It was nice to have them back and to hear about their time away. On the way up to the airport, the sun was setting and I took this picture of clouds in the northwest, lit by the evening sun.
Dusky Clouds
The clouds were quite dramatic as I drove home this evening. I would have liked to stop and take a picture but the main road has no where to pull over where I’d be able to get a good view of the sunset. I pulled into the nearby shopping center and could see the clouds but the actual sunset was hidden. So, I made do with what I could see. These clouds were to the south of the setting sun and were nice enough, if not full of color, to deserve a picture of two.
Foggy Neighborhood
The roads in our neighborhood are not particularly dramatic, in general. On rare occasions, like this morning, when the fog was fairly thick, they can be fairly beautiful (however search the web for “Dark Hedges Ireland” sometime for a really dramatic lane). As I went out to drive to work today I thought I’d spend a few minutes driving around the neighborhood taking pictures.
It would probably be better without the mailboxes and lamp posts or the minivan parked on the right, but it’s still quite pretty. These are fairly large red oaks, planted in 1968 or 1969, so a little over 45 years old, and going strong. One of the street trees in front of our house, planted at the same time, died and was removed (that’s where Cathy’s marigold bed is now). The other two are still healthy but not as large as these, which are nicely proportioned. The fog adds to the drama, of course.
Lake Needwood
I know I’ve done Lake Needwood recently (see Friday, October 23, 2015) but I went to work that way again today and stopped for some pictures. The sky was an amazing blue and the reflection of the sky was, if anything, more amazing. Many of the trees have lost their leaves but there is still some color left. A little orange, yellow, and red to contrast with the blue. Definitely worth stopping for ten minutes, even if it made me a few minutes late getting to work.
Evening Light in the Tops of the Trees
I’ve been enjoying the light after leaving work but because we went off so-called daylight saving time yesterday, the sun sets just about the time I leave work now. When I went out to my car this evening, the evening sun was just on the tops of the trees, both behind my building, where I park, and in front of the building, across the street. This is the view past my building to those across the street, where the trees are on a hill. My office is on the right, just out of the picture, looking out on the Norway spruce.
C&O Canal, Below Swain’s Lock
It was another absolutely beautiful day today. Cathy had a soccer game and I was in Potomac anyway, so I decided to go for a walk on the C&O Canal. I drove out River Road and down to Swain’s Lock, walking down the towpath towards D.C. There were quite a few people out, as you’d expect on a day like this, but fewer than there would have been in summer, I suppose. It was the perfect temperature for a walk and the sky was remarkably blue. The colors in the trees seem to have passed their peak, in general, but there was still a fair amount, here and there.
The beech trees are still mostly green and the sycamores nearly bare. There was less red then one could hope for, adding exclamation points to the vistas, but there were a few places, like around this rock, where there was still a riot of color to be seen.
Autumn Sunset
Here I am posting a second time today (and the third picture). I don’t generally get complaints about sunsets, though, so I’ll go ahead. Actually, sunsets seem to be my number two most popular subject after people and family members in particular. I guess I understand that. Sunsets are pretty amazing, in spite of how common they are. The happen often (well, technically they happen every evening, but they are not spectacular every evening). But they are fleeting and ephemeral and really are not captured in a photograph. We only love the photographs because they remind us of the real thing, which is so much better.
Trees By Moonlight
I didn’t have a lot of time to get out for picture taking today. After work I fixed myself dinner before heading off for a meeting. Because traffic is so unpredictable around here, I like to give myself extra time, particularly on some routes. That includes Muncaster Mill Road, which sometimes backs up terribly. Tonight it wasn’t so bad and I got where I was going a bit early.
The moon was out and shining through the trees where I parked and I thought I’d take a few pictures of that before going in. This one is a 6 second exposure at f/5.7, with a little extra light on the trees from my flashlight, which is a fairly bright LED model.
I also took a few pictures with the camera aimed straight up, showing stars and with the clouds blurring a bit due to the 30 second exposure, but those were not very good.
Sunset With Powerlines
I was driving over to Ben’s house this evening for a meeting. I had already taken a few pictures of my dinner. I know you all were hoping to see one of those, but as I turned off of Rt. 108 onto Fieldcrest Road, the sun was sinking into the west behind this line of power lines. I pulled off and took a dozen pictures of so. I don’t usually take industrial type pictures, although I also like them when I see them. This one turned out pretty well, though.
Evening Sky
I took a few pictures in the back yard this afternoon but I wasn’t very happy with them. I had sort of resigned myself to posting a picture that I wasn’t particularly excited about. At a little after 6:00 I went to a dinner engagement and as I parked, the sky to the west was starting to get a deeper shade of blue and the clouds were quite lovely. So, you get a reprieve from a boring picture and get a beautiful western autumn sky in early autumn, instead. You cannot tell from this picture but just below the image is interstate 270. Not particularly lovely, but the noise wasn’t enough to counteract the beauty above.
Lunar Eclipse
We were up bright and early this morning and got off by about 6:20. We made good time and didn’t have any real traffic issues all the way to Boston. We dropped Dorothy off at school and then returned later for Catacombs, a service held in the chapel on Sunday evenings. Before that started, though, we enjoyed the beginning of the lunar eclipse. I had brought my tripod but unfortunately, I had removed a piece from it to use with a flash bracket and had forgotten the bring that, so the tripod was basically useless (I couldn’t attach the camera to it). In consequence, this is hand held, and therefore not nearly as sharp as I would like. Still, it’s pretty clear that there is a shadow beginning to cover the moon.
I did get some pictures of the rust colored moon during the total phase, but they are less sharp even than this, requiring exposures of more than half a second or so. Not worth posting, I’m afraid.
Sunset
I’m still playing catch-up on my posts. This evening I was looking around for things to photograph. It was too dark to easily get pictures in the yard and I didn’t really have any ideas. Then, I was blessed with a subject that I didn’t have to go far to see.
The sun set into the west, as it tends to do, and the clouds lit up beautifully.
Morning Rainbow
About an hour after I got up, I noticed that the light out front was quite warm colored. That often means there is a good sunrise but when I looked out the color, while pretty, was fairly flat and not really suited for a picture. I happened to look out the kitchen window (which faces west south west), and not only was the color about the same but there was a rainbow going all the way across the sky. I woke Cathy and we both enjoyed it for about fifteen minutes and (surprise!) I took a few pictures. Rainbows are somewhat hard to photograph well. They generally aren’t as bright in the picture as they seemed in real life. Also, the surrounding scenery usually comes out darker than it really was. This one turned out reasonably well, though.
Sunset, Perquimans County, North Carolina
It was a long and hard week although I’m not going to go into details here. Those who know us know what happened. Anyway, this morning my mom and I drove down to North Carolina for a family reunion. It was a long day, especially considering we drove home again afterward but I’m ever so glad we went. After a week like this, being with family is as good as it gets. I took a few pictures during the reunion (and passed the 110,000 mark on this camera), but I decided that I’d post this picture, taken shortly after we left, instead.
Sunrise, Ocean Isle Beach
We’ve had some pretty spectacular sunrises at Ocean Isle Beach in past years. For instance, on July 31 of last year. The sunrises this year didn’t really rank up there but we only had two of them. Perhaps later in the week they were better. Nevertheless, I was up before sunrise (which was at 6:21 this morning) so I figured I should go out and take some pictures. This one turned out reasonably well. The clouds off to the right were pretty dramatic, at least.
Sunset
An obvious difficulty when taking a photograph that includes the sun is that it’s fairly bright. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, I guess, but what do you do about it. It isn’t just bright, it is very, very bright. If you shorten the exposure so that the sun doesn’t overwhelm the photograph, then the rest of the sky becomes very dark.
One obvious thing to do is wait for a sunset when the sun is rendered darker due to atmospheric conditions. At times like that, the number of stops between the brightness of the sun and the sky is reduced to a more manageable amount. Even so, there is still a difference. I confess to cheating a little for this image. In the original the sun is nearly pure white, still having been overexposed a bit. But I took various exposures, including one that is three f/stops darker (1/3200 of a second instead of 1/400). The sun you see in this image came from the darker image, while the rest is from the lighter. It works, though, because that’s actually the way our eyes see the scene, having more dynamic range than camera sensors.